I would like to begin with a reference to the general theme of this lecture series. Despite obvious differences between the practices of science and the practising of a religion, there is one important resemblance. This is that, while they are both rooted in human experience and culture, they also seek to transcend the particularities of time and place to yield truths that claim a more universal significance.

Science, no less than religion, has been rooted in local cultures; and the shaping of Darwin's theory of evolution would be a good example. It was after he had read a work of political economy, the Essay on Population of the Reverend Thomas Malthus, that Darwin claimed he had at last got a theory to work by. The Malthusian image of disproportion between an expanding population and limited resources had featured in debates about charity to the poor and helped to crystallize the idea of natural selection in Darwin's mind. When recalling the impact of Malthus's Essay, Darwin also said that he had been 'well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence'. On the voyage of the Beagle, he had had the opportunity to see nature in the raw, to see the giant condors in South America preying on young cattle. From the study of fossil forms he had come to appreciate the extent of extinction. But such experiences were only possible for him because Britain was an expanding imperial and naval power. The main purpose of the voyage was to improve the accuracy of earlier surveys of the coastline of South America.

Prior to the voyage, Darwin had been studying in Cambridge to become a priest in the Anglican Church. Here was another influence that was culturally specific. Among his mentors were clergyman naturalists who interpreted the natural world as a work of creation in which the structures of living organisms had been beautifully adapted for their functions. Darwin's lifelong preoccupation with adaptation and how it had been achieved was inspired at least in part by his reading of theologians, such as William Paley, who saw evidence of design in impressive organs like the human eye. Later claiming that in Cambridge he had preferred beetles to books, the young Darwin nevertheless absorbed the customary references to a Creator. In his early transmutation notebooks he suggested that 'the Creator creates through laws'. When he wrote his Descent of Man (1871) he was explicit in saying that ideas drawn from a prevailing Christian culture had shaped his theory: it was from works of natural theology that he had uncritically accepted the view that every detail of structure must have had some use for the creature which possessed it.

Despite the shaping of Darwin's science by these historical and cultural contingencies, evolutionary biologists would also want to say that the final mature theory transcended them and has a universal application. It would not be difficult to find comparable examples from the history of religious thought.

In this lecture I wish to focus on an idea that illustrates the quest for truths that are rooted in human experience but which also purport to transcend it. This is the idea of the 'unity of nature', which has featured in both scientific and religious discourse. My argument is first, that both science and the monotheistic religions have had an investment in the unity of nature, and second, that because Darwin achieved an unprecedented unification of biology his science actually provided a new resource for theologians, even if it was not always welcomed. I also want to show how ideas about the unity of nature have mediated between scientific and religious discourse. References to the unity of nature provide a window through which many different connections between scientific and religious concerns can be observed. We should not imagine that the relations between them are always best understood in terms of conflict. Popular anecdotes may encourage the dualities and the dichotomies. The British politician Disraeli once declared that, following Darwin, one had to be on the side of the apes or of the angels, and he was for the latter, sprouting angel wings when depicted in the popular press. Good jokes, however, are not always the best guide to good history.

I begin with some historical examples that predate Darwin and which show that monotheistic concepts could do real work in the sciences.

I shall then examine some of the reasons why Darwin inclined to an agnostic position and consequently shed some of the metaphysics that had previously driven the quest for unity. Toward the end of the lecture, I shall consider reasons why we might be tempted to associate Darwinism with divisiveness rather than unity. But my conclusion will be that, in some respects, Darwin unified nature as never before. Therefore, paradoxically or not, he lent support to modified theologies of nature.

The subject of nature's unity is absorbing because it gives another twist to an ironic thread running through the literature on science on religion ' that forms of scientific enquiry once legitimated by theological discourse have subsequently bitten the hand that fed them. Concepts of the unity of nature, once derived from theological considerations, have been appropriated by many popular science writers who wish to laud the sciences at the expense of religion.

A first question might be whether ideas about the unity of nature might not have had several origins including the theological. It is of course necessary to distinguish between the unity of nature and the unity of science, though arguments for the former have often drawn on arguments for the latter. The very intelligibility of nature has been a mark of its unity. To admit the relevance of theological categories was no embarrassment to Whitehead who in Science and the Modern World spoke of an intelligible order antecedently guaranteed:

To focus on the unity of nature can be instructive here, because it was one of the metaphysical underpinnings of much of 17^th-century natural philosophy. When Descartes likened his activity as a natural philosopher to an architect or lawmaker, he insisted there was not as much perfection in works made by many masters 'as in those on which one man alone has worked'. Buildings designed by a single architect, he added, usually have more beauty and are better planned than those which many have tried to design. From Descartes we can see some of the many different levels on which unity might be affirmed. In his cosmology the concept of 'tourbillons', of vortices of subtle matter, constituted a unifying concept, embracing other solar systems. At a deeper level he insisted on a unique set of laws of impact pertaining to this world. And despite his dislocation of the human soul from the world machine, he did envisage a reunification of the human with the physical world:

We should note the confluence of the philosophical with the theological to produce that last sense of unification 'a union of the knower with the known.

In characterising what might be meant by the unity of nature, Ian Hacking considers the formula : 'one world, one reality, one truth'. But he dismisses that formula because it misses a crucial feature of the scientific life that he observes in James Clerk Maxwell, and which is certainly discernible in earlier scientists. It leaves out a feeling of awe, wonder and respect. Maxwell spoke of a duty to impress on our minds 'the extent, the order and the unity of the universe'. And this included the appreciation of a harmony that was worthy of praise. The aesthetic graduated into the reverential, as it clearly did for Kepler.

In earlier natural philosophy we find well known metaphors for nature that were attractive because they did convey a sense of awe, as well as granting a degree of autonomy to empirical investigation. These were metaphors that, in their circulation, reinforced nature's unity. In many cases the metaphors mediated directly between empirical and religious concerns. They could also be read in many different ways.

The metaphor of nature as a book is perhaps the perfect example. In Kepler the language of God's two books is said to be accommodated to the human intellect by their divine author. For Francis Bacon an appeal to the two books underscored a sense of obligation to study the book of God's works just as there was a duty to study the book of God's words. For Galileo the book of God's words had meanings accessible to the vulgar, but also deeper meanings to which only the study of the second book gave access. For Isaac Newton how one book was read had implications for the reading of the other: a single definitive meaning for each biblical text was the equivalent of a definitive account of each natural phenomenon. And the attraction, in every case, was that one could always argue that since the two books did have the same author there could never be a real contradiction between them when both were properly understood.

Or take the metaphor of the clock. If the universe is like the cathedral clock in Strasbourg it has a unity. But it also has workings that the natural philosopher may investigate, without prejudice to the fact that its various parts have been designed with intent. Robert Boyle could be overawed by a mite. To describe it as curious 'engine' emphasised the work of a designer in that captivating underworld revealed through the microscope. The microscope itself mediated between empirical enquiry and a revitalised natural theology in which the sense of awe was often explicit, magnified by new contrasts between the natural and the artificial.

Human artefacts, such as a finely drawn needle, looked crude and defective when magnified, whereas the most mundane of natural objects, such as the scales of a fish, would reveal an unsuspected beauty.

My point is that a presupposition of the unity of nature allowed both scientific activity and religious sensibility to co-exist even if the theology was sometimes bent in heterodox directions.

Isaac Newton provides perhaps the best example for testing a claim that unity principles might do real work in the sciences. In exploring what the unity of science might mean, Ian Hacking identified three metaphysical theses that might find expression in scientific practice. One is a thesis of interconnectedness, which he notes in some minds 'is rooted in a religious conception of the world and how God must have made it' ' religious in the sense of the major monotheistic religions. Newton would be an exemplar through his connecting lunar and planetary orbits with terrestrial gravitation. A second metaphysical thesis, which Hacking calls the structural, refers to the unification achieved by subsuming laws of nature under those of higher generality, which Newton would again illustrate through his explanation of Kepler's laws. Hacking's third metaphysical thesis he describes as taxonomic since it refers to the belief that there is 'one fundamental, ultimate, right system of classifying everything'. Nature contains natural kinds. One of the clearest examples of this principle in Newton would be his taxonomy of natural forces. When in Query 31 of his Opticks he referred to the attractions of gravity, electricity and magnetism, Newton added that 'these Instances shew the Tenor and Course of Nature, and make it not improbable but that there may be more attractive powers than these. For Nature is very consonant and conformable to herself.' As has long been recognised, there was a dream here of quantifying all of nature's forces including the uncooperative one of chemical affinity. There were times, too, when Newton would construct analogies between the intervals of the musical scale, the optical spectrum and planetary distances, seeking an overarching unity.

The consonance of Nature and the analogy of nature did do work for Newton. It would be difficult to deny that one of his arguments for the universality of the laws of motion derived from his understanding of divine omnipresence:

The God who perceived everything was the God to whom Newton in his youth confessed such sins as telling lies about a louse, eating an apple in the house of God, making a mousetrap on the Sabbath, and dreaming of burning down his mother's house with his stepfather in it!

The inverse move from the unity of nature to the unity of the godhead, despite its circularity, was to prove extremely resilient in standard works of natural theology. Devoting an entire chapter to the unity of the deity, William Paley began it by declaring that there was proof in the uniformity of plan observable in the universe. One principle of gravitation caused a stone to drop toward the earth and the moon to wheel around it. One law of attraction carried all the planets about the sun. Paley was a bit worried by lobsters despite the fact that the taste of good food was evidence of divine goodness. Their exterior skeleton perhaps made them anomalous? But no; this was merely a structural inversion adding to the wonderful variety of adaptations in which a deeper unity could be discerned. In the work of the Creator had been an 'imitation, a remembrance, a carrying on of the same plan'. We smile at the naivety especially when we read that the human epiglottis is so wonderfully designed that no alderman had ever choked at a feast. But, as recent scholarship has shown, Paley's text and the later Bridgewater Treatises, however naïve their theology, played an important role in popularising the sciences in a politically safe form.

At a deeper level we can ask more critical questions about the drive for unification. Surely the consonance between belief in a unified nature and the espousal of a monotheistic religion was no guarantee that experimental programmes to consolidate a unification would be successful. Geoffrey Cantor has suggested that Michael Faraday's convictions about interconvertible forces, their conservation and their role in the economy of Creation were reinforced by his Sandemanian religious beliefs. They certainly generated a research programme. There is a diary entry for 19 March 1849 that reads: 'Gravity. Surely this force must be capable of an experimental relation to Electricity, Magnetism and the other forces, so as to bind it up with them in reciprocal action and equivalent effect. Consider for a moment how to set about touching this matter by facts and trial'. Ingenious trials did ensue. A helix of wire connected to a galvanometer was dropped a full 36 feet in the Royal Institution lecture theatre; but, as Cantor nicely puts it, the galvanometer remained unmoved. The gravitational force retained its peculiarity. Faraday did not pre-empt Steven Weinberg's title, Dreams of a final Theory, but he did write in block capitals 'ALL THIS IS A DREAM'.

The presence of diversity as a precondition of unification manifests itself in the natural theology of the early nineteenth century; and I might perhaps be forgiven for choosing an Oxford example: William Buckland who fought valiantly to secure a place for geology in the university. Buckland was the eccentric who took a blue bag to dinner parties in order to take home fish bones for further investigation; who so littered his rooms in Christ Church with dusty fossils that they became impenetrable and whose culinary empiricism resulted in guests dining on hedgehog and crocodile. But how was he to vindicate geology from a suspicion of irreligion in a University dominated by its religious traditions? It was a pertinent question given the increasing evidence for extinction and concerns about what this might mean for belief in a caring Providence. Did fossil finds not destroy that most pleasing of taxonomies, the Great Chain of Being ' pleasing in part because diversity was so elegantly incorporated within an overarching unity? If one followed Cuvier the chain had to be fractured into different sections. In Buckland's rhetoric, however, a theological drive for unity comes across loud and clear. The fact of extinction need not compromise a principle of plenitude ' that the Creator had created every living form that could possibly exist. It was simply that they had not all coexisted. Fossil forms were the missing links not in an evolutionary sequence but links in what Nicolaas Rupke has called the great chain of history. This is Buckland himself:

Creatures were wanted dead or alive but they were assuredly still creatures. After Robert Chambers and then Charles Darwin perhaps they were not? Perhaps, as they had earlier been for Lamarck, they were merely products of nature?

And so to Darwin's loss of faith in the Creator who might have guaranteed the unity of nature. Late in life, Darwin did his best to answer an earnest enquirer:

This is agnosticism of a kind: it is more than hinted that some questions are unanswerable and that scientific practice breeds caution, perhaps even scepticism. I also see pathos in this letter because more than forty years earlier, when Charles had just become engaged to Emma, she had worried about that very point ' that the mind-set associated with the practice of science might distance him from the biblical verses she most cherished.

To understand Darwin's agnosticism a few distinctions may help. A popular understanding might be that theism affirms the existence of God, atheism denies it and agnosticism declares the question unanswerable. But we know there are many kinds of theism, in some of which a deity is supposed not merely to exist but to be active in the world. We also know that there can be many kinds of atheist. Charles Bradlaugh put the point well: 'I am an Atheist, but I do not say that there is no God; and until you tell me what you mean by God I am not mad enough to say anything of the kind'. Similarly for the agnostic who might not doubt the existence of a first cause but who, like David Hume, might deny that anything could be known about it. These are elementary distinctions but they have to feature in any story told of Darwin's trajectory from belief in a personal God to his self-description as increasingly agnostic. There is, for example, a distinction he makes in the Descent of Man. He is discussing whether races have existed that had no idea of one or more gods. His answer from his experiences on the Beagle voyage is a resounding 'yes'. Some races have had no words in their language to express the idea of deity. But this question, he immediately adds, is 'wholly distinct from that higher one, whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the universe'. That question he continued, 'has been answered in the affirmative by some of the highest intellects that have ever existed'. If Darwin intends to count himself among those affirmers, then a possible source of agnosticism ' the lack of a universal sense of God ' is over-ridden by an appeal to superior intellects. But this very passage introduces yet another problem: the ambiguity of Darwin's public statements. He does not actually say that he agrees with these high intellects.

Darwin's distinctions are important. It has been said that Darwin's inexorable exposure of the process of natural selection removed the need to posit a First Cause as the origin of Life on Earth. It is not clear that Darwin would have agreed with that. The adjective 'inexorable' is inappropriate since even in his agnostic days Darwin admitted that, while the fact of evolution was widely accepted, there was no consensus on the mechanism. Importantly, Darwin had not solved the riddle of those first few living forms. It worried Huxley's contemporary John Tyndall that Darwin had not given a naturalistic account of the origin of life. The option to believe in a god-of-the-gaps, if one was so inclined, was clearly still open.

A further complication concerns the nature of religious belief. It has been tempting for historians to streamline Darwin's progression from Christianity to deism to agnosticism, as if there must be a linear and irreversible attenuation of belief. Darwin himself preferred to say that his beliefs often fluctuated. When he spoke of an increasing agnosticism as he grew older, he included the three words 'but not always'. What one sees is an oscillation between evolutionary theism and an outright agnosticism. To complicate matters further, a thoughtful agnosticism could itself become, accompany or nurture a religious position.

The temptation to ascribe Darwin's agnosticism to his science has been irresistible. At work was not only that cautious mind-set we have already seen but the success of what is sometimes called a methodological naturalism. The more we know of the fixed laws of nature, he famously wrote, the more incredible do miracles become. His process of natural selection could counterfeit design: Paley's argument from contrivance to contriver was denatured. The ramifications were serious if one wished to see the world as Paley had seen it: happy and contented with its buzzing insects of a summer night. Darwin emphatically did replace that image: once one had been staggered, as he claimed to be, by the extent of nature's extinctions, it was those insects that cruelly and horribly laid their eggs in the bodies of caterpillars that buried themselves in his mind. Darwin did not destroy the argument from laws of nature to their lawgiver. This is an important qualification. But if his belief in a personal God had ever rested on the adaptive minutiae of living organisms it would certainly have been shaken by his theory. As he protested to Asa Gray in October 1861, 'when I think of my beloved orchids, with rudiments of five anthers, with one pistil converted into a rostellum, with all the cohesion of parts, it really seems to me incredibly monstrous to look at an orchid as created as we now see it'. Earlier he had tried to clarify his position when Gray had suggested that the variations on which natural selection worked might have been designed. Darwin objected. It was not that 'designed variation' made his 'deity 'Natural Selection' superfluous'; but rather from studying domestic variations he had come to see what an enormous field of undesigned variability there was for natural selection to appropriate. In Darwin's reference there to natural selection as his 'deity' we catch a glimpse of what Susan Cannon observed long ago ' that Darwin did not so much destroy the universe of the natural theologians as steal it from them. But was this enough to induce agnosticism with reference to the being of a God ' the kind of God who might be described as the ground of the possibility of there being a mechanism of natural selection at all? Darwin's use of language suggests that perhaps it was not. Certainly in the letters to Gray he pleads a lack of clarity on the matter. He would say he was in a hopeless muddle or that he did not feel sure of his ground. In the early drafts of his theory he had even used the device of a 'being with foresight' to explicate what he meant by natural selection. That really had muddied the waters.

Were there, then, other sources of unbelief to which we might point?

Here are a few that we find in recent literature. The river of dissent that ran through his family from his radical grandfather through his sceptical father to his atheist brother has to be considered. If Christian preachers put unbelievers beyond the pale, then members of his own family were destined for perdition. The doctrine of eternal damnation he would describe as a 'damnable doctrine'. The issue took on an existential dimension when his father died in the late '40s. As many commentators have observed, Darwin shared in that moral revolt against Christian orthodoxies that was to exact its toll in so many minds. Add to this Darwin's realisation that one could lead an exemplary moral life as a freethinker or an atheist and foundations might crumble. As Fiona Erskine has argued, this realisation came to him vividly during his London years through contact with Harriet Martineau and her circle.

Darwin would even authenticate his dissent through the family lineage. Jim Moore has noted that he saw an hereditary linkage between his grandfather's attitudes and his own. The grandson put it this way: 'a man who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward' can find a basis for morality apart from religion in the cultivation of hereditary 'social instincts'.

Moore's answer to the question why Darwin gave up Christianity is the most sensitive yet because it highlights not merely the physical pain and suffering that Charles found so difficult to square with a beneficent God, but the mental pain and anguish that accompanied the cruel loss of his daughter Annie at the tender age of ten. That was early 1851, later than the dates routinely given for his renunciation of a Christian faith. Annie's death, with its crucifixion of hope, could have been a last straw.

This was an event that tore him apart, but it was also part of a wider pattern of events that I have always felt disposed him against a caring Providence. That pattern was the absence of a pattern. It was the sheer contingency, the fortuitousness of the accidental in human lives and in the rest of nature. He once asked Asa Gray to consider the case of an 'innocent and good man' who, standing under a tree, is killed by lightning. 'Do you believe', he asked Gray, pointing up the question by adding that he really would like to hear, 'Do you believe that God designedly killed this man? Many or most persons do believe this; I can't and don't'. The case was surely no different from that of the luckless gnat swallowed by a swallow. Random events that refused to be part of a coherent story undoubtedly weighed upon him.

In what sense then was Darwin's agnosticism scientific? There was an ulterior respect in which his theory did bear on his own convictions. Curiously he often spoke of one conviction, an 'inward conviction' that this wonderful universe could not be the product of chance. The details of an orchid or even the human eye he could not believe were designed. But what of the wonderful whole? Might there be designed laws, with the details left to chance? He was never satisfied, even with that formulation. And this was the reason he repeatedly gave in his agnostic years: if the human mind is itself the product of evolution, if it is only that little more refined than the mind of a dog, what grounds have we for supposing it capable of solving the metaphysical riddles? Darwin was not above holding convictions. For some that did make him distinctive among the agnostics. But he was distinctive, too, because it was he above all, who had supplied the scientific reasons for mistrusting his own convictions.

Was it possible to be a Darwinian and still believe in the unity of nature? In many respects the theory of natural selection proved so divisive that it may be difficult to think in terms of unities. It emphatically did not unite those elements of nature we call human beings. As Gillian Beer has pointed out in her delightful book Darwin's Plots, many of the metaphors Darwin used to articulate his theory, including that of selection, could be read in different ways. The metaphor of a branching tree, which Darwin used to illustrate divergence from common ancestors was ambiguous in that it both denied and affirmed progress. There was no linear progression to the human race as top dog; and yet the overall growth of a tree was upwards. The theory was ambiguous on what was to become the sensitive question of race. All humans were ultimately from a single origin and yet the subtitle of Darwin's book was 'the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life'.

Within Christendom the theory was deeply divisive. The Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce fell out with one of his own ordinands, Frederick Temple, over the correct response to Darwin and other liberalising trends. The pervasive legend that Wilberforce baited Darwin's disciple, Thomas Henry Huxley, by asking whether he would prefer to think of himself descended from an ape on his grandmother's or grandfather's side, only to be humiliated by Huxley's scathing reply in which he implied that he would prefer to have an ape for an ancestor than a certain bishop, misses the seriousness with which Wilberforce reviewed Darwin's Origin of Species and the fact that the story was largely a retrospective invention, one of the foundation myths of scientific professionalism. Unlike Temple, who was to become both an evolutionist and Archbishop of Canterbury, Wilberforce was, however, a resolute critic of Darwin. At Princeton there were similar divisions. Charles Hodge found the mechanism of natural selection atheistic while James McCosh simply concluded that the prevalence of accident could not be accidental.

We may associate Darwinism with divisiveness for another reason. As a scientific theory it has been exploited to support every political creed from socialism to an unrestrained capitalism to a vehement nationalism. Nor, surely, does Darwin give us a picture of nature at one with itself? Images of gladiatorial struggle and nature red in tooth and claw were a long way from Paley's happy world. The contented face of nature, Darwin once wrote, is but a mask.

And yet in such statements nature was still in the singular. Were there not respects in which Darwin achieved one of the most remarkable unifications in the entire history of science? Scientists themselves almost invariably believe so. The manner in which data from biogeography, paleontology, embryology, variation under domestication and political economy were co-ordinated in a single conceptual framework has often been seen as a perfect fulfilment of William Whewell's demand for consilience in a theory worth defending. Darwin could explain why there had been so much extinction, why the more ancient a fossil was the more intermediate a form it had between existing species. He could explain why island species resembled those of neighbouring continents. He could incorporate the Malthusian struggle for limited resources, which in September 1838 had given him the key to his mechanism. He could even incorporate fancy pigeons to give substance to his metaphor of selection. If breeders could achieve such effects from a common rock pigeon, what might not nature do with so much more time on her hands?

There was also a subtle unification at a metaphysical level. The birth and death of species were presented as quintessentially no different in their explicability than the birth and death of individuals. But there is one other aspect of Darwin's unification that perhaps deserves a final comment. This is his preference for locating the ultimate origin of all species in a single life form. To Hacking's three metaphysical theses that have been capable of doing work, it is tempting to add a fourth. A predilection for unity might simply translate into a thesis about a singularity of origin. Darwin had been careful to refer to one or a few forms in an original manifestation of life; but even he could not resist the lure of the most economical solution: 'Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype'. This means that during the 1860s at least four explanations predicated on a unity of origin were on the table for how ultimately we came to be here.

At one extreme was the simple theism in which all was resolved into the will of a single deity ' an explanation that for Darwin explained nothing. At the other extreme was the complete naturalism of a Darwinian such as John Tyndall. Competing intermediates were Darwin's ambiguous position on whether the first material form of life could be said to be the work of a Creator who created by laws; and the theism of Richard Owen, in which creation was continuous as new instantiations of a divine archetype (a single archetype) came into being. In that competition, different models for the unity of nature were in serious contention, but it almost goes without saying that deeply held religious convictions could and often did inform each of them.

And so to my concluding observation. Some commentators saw theological advantages in a unified process of evolution in which as Darwin had put it in one of his early notebooks 'we are all netted together'. Darwin's correspondent and advocate in America Asa Gray certainly found theological advantages. He even detected the possibility of a new theodicy:

Gray may not have carried the world with him but in that passage a unified nature survived in the form of a unified process. As he put it elsewhere, evolutionary relationships showed how biological species are 'all part of one system, realizations in nature 'of the conception of One Mind'.

I conclude with Gray because he identified a further respect in which a unification effected through Darwin's science might have deep religious significance. That ultimate single origin of all living things meant that claims for primordially different races could surely be silenced? It has been argued that the polygenetic theories of the nineteenth century were intrinsically more threatening to an orthodox Christianity than the idea of evolution per se. Gray was not alone in seeing in Darwinian evolution support for the monogenetic case. To defend the unity of humankind required the different races to have diverged from a common ancestor. This was precisely the kind of process that Darwin had expounded. It was the polygenists who were now up against it. As Gray put it: those who 'recognize several or numerous human species, will hardly be able to maintain that such species were primordial and supernatural in the ordinary sense of the word.'

But let us end not in the past but with the present. Here is a little coda on a code. One of the best known British newspapers, The Daily Telegraph, recently carried an editorial headed 'Faith in Darwin'. Wherever you go, it stated, 'whatever animal, plant or bug you look at, if it is alive, it will use the same genetic code'. It means that 'there was only one creation'. The conclusion might have been written for this lecture. It reads as follows:

For centuries scientists have been picking holes in the unified world view of the great monotheistic religions. Yet, through the DNA code, one branch of their learning, genetics, has uncovered an astonishing unity in all created things. Its findings point to a common ground on which both sides of the debate could fruitfully meet. [Daily Telegraph 16 August 1999]

As an anthropologist whose worldview has been shaped more by the Darwins and Dawkins than by the Margaret Meads or Malinowskis, I am excited to have this opportunity to comment on Prof. Brooke's interesting analysis of the 'unification' of nature concept that developed, in part, from the historical influence of monotheistic tradition. While religious beliefs may have periodically been subjected to great scrutiny and viewed as antithetical to science, Prof. Brooke argues that these beliefs may nonetheless have motivated the direction of the scientific pursuits of Darwin and other scientists.

Any thorough exploration of the relationships between religion and evolution will inevitably stir up correlations, and it's important to remember that these may be due to a) religious ideas motivating the kinds of questions scientists ask and their stated (or unstated) objectives, b) metaphor-laden discourse meant to make evolution appear more palatable to religious audiences (and maybe themselves), and c) post-hoc similarities in perspectives, implications, or areas of inquiry. Brooke's eloquent discussion makes it evident that all three are apparent in the history of modern evolutionary thought. I am reminded of Los Alamos, NM, which has one of the highest per-capita number of science Ph.Ds in the U.S. and also a surprisingly large number of churches--further evidence that the practice of (at least nuclear) science and the goals of religion are not mutually exclusive. Nonetheless, I think we should be careful not to confuse the three kinds of similiarities between religion and evolution. I wish to comment first on how confounding these three levels can get us swimming in circles.

First, the material reality of the universe, which requires a first cause or prime mover, and adherence to the principles of uniformitarianism and consilience, can be explained by invoking omnipotent deities or a primordial ooze-based evolutionary process (or for that matter, the Iroquois story of the world created on the back of a turtle). All explanations are 'theories' in the colloquial sense, and so any data collected to 'test' (or more likely meant to support) these theories can promote a sense of wonder. It may be difficult to find observations that can't be interpreted as evidence of God's divinity and omnipotence, and hence worthy of praise or respect. Observations of elaborately complex traits, behaviors, organisms, and ecosystems can be awe-inspiring by non-religious scientists precisely when scores of observations help shape and support a discriminating theory that independently explains many interesting and non-intuitive aspects of natural design. Although wonder and awe are fundamentally 'religious' expressions, they can be experienced by scientists with little conviction in organized religion or monotheism, even though the verbalizations of such wonder so commonly fall back on mythic vocabularies.

If we believe spirituality, morality, and beauty can exist independent of belief in divine creation, then we should perhaps take Darwin at his word, and accept his agnosticism as genuine. Although monotheistic tradition can influence motivations underlying the pursuit of science and the kinds of questions investigated, the process of science, and the criterion of falsifiable hypothesis testing, clearly distinguish scientific from religious explanation. As John Maynard Smith argues in Science and Myth and Dawkins in Universal Darwinism, the legacy of Darwinism, as a research enterprise and as an emerging worldview (bigger perhaps than even Darwin could have imagined), is due to the simple fact that the theory of natural selection has withstood heaps of empirical testing, and not due to the historical ambience or cultural inheritance of the times. The directed accumulation of knowledge that results from the scientific process cannot help but be awe-inspiring as it reveals the kind of natural law that transcends any single individual's experience or insight, and without recourse to divine creation. In fact, the way science builds, adapts, and leads to complex understandings mirrors the very process of evolution by natural selection that leads to complex design.

Second, it seems to me that eastern worldviews and pantheistic beliefs may correlate as strongly if not more with a Darwinian worldview than monotheistic Judeo-Christian beliefs, even if the former had little or no historical influence on Darwin's pen. Darwinism and monotheism both emphasize unity, but we shouldn't forget that medieval religious thought, as influenced by the Great Chain of Being, sets humans apart from the rest of the natural world. This is true even though the observable universe is believed to be created by a single deity. This kind of unity is a divisive one at best, whereas Buddhist religious philosophy meshes better with a Darwinian view of the dynamic natural world and the individuals (plant, animal and otherwise) that inhabit it. Prof. Brooke argued that Darwinism may be viewed as divisive due to the implications that evolution implies phylogenetic ancestor trees, although the extent to which this is divisive is debatable, depending on the time depth considered ' as evident in the current debate among paleoanthropologists regarding the Multiregional and Garden of Eden models of human origins. I believe that in the bigger picture, Darwinism is best viewed as a unified theory where biological diversity, elaborate morphological and behavioral adaptations, and extinctions all make sense under the powerful discriminating yardstick of biological fitness and the prime directive of fitness maximization given local constraints (which may themselves be subject to selection).

My final comments address areas typically within the domain of religious discourse, where I believe the legacy of Darwin and the evolutionary enterprise can shed novel insight. These are the areas of charity, temptation, and sin. The evolutionary study of human altruism has closely examined the conditions that favor selfless giving, especially in populations without written laws or organized religion. Additionally, I think reciprocal altruism theory has much to say about Maimonides' Eight Degrees of Charity. Although one could argue that the 'eye for an eye' tit-for-tat strategy common in the biological literature on cooperation was inspired by Biblical scripture, no amount of Biblical relevance can defend the success of this strategy in evolutionary tournaments. Temptation has been investigated by those studying the evolutionary basis for universal patterns of time discounting, time-valued preferences, and life history strategies. Sins such as avarice, jealousy, infidelity, lack of respect for elders, lying, and theft have each been investigated in myriad ways from those invoking evolutionary perspectives. These are generally not argued to be adaptations per se, but rather evolved components of our behavioral reportoire, which rear their ugly heads when conditions favor them.